The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with disclosures not known to the relevant art prior to the present invention but provided by the invention. Some of such contributions of the invention may be specifically pointed out below, whereas other such contributions of the invention will be apparent from their context.
Communication networks are constantly under development. For example, the data rates supported by different radio communication networks are constantly increasing. High data rates are offered by 3rd generation networks utilising HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) and 4th generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) or the LTE-Advanced (LTE-A)), for example.
The air interfaces of the current and future networks are capable of supporting much higher data rates as compared to wireless technologies of previous generations, effectively putting much more stress on the processing performed at the various network elements that support the air interface. The increase in data rates has made the use of smart phones more popular adding more data traffic volume to the networks.
As the demand for wireless data consumption keeps increasing, telecom companies and operators are looking at innovative ways of meeting user expectations and enhancing the user experience even further. One of the essential aspects of this push is the densification of the radio access networks by adding low power base stations or access points such as micro, pico and femto access points. These low power base stations require connections to the other parts of the networks. This requires significant investments.
One possible implementation of low power base stations is to utilise remote radio heads (RRH). A remote radio head comprises a part of the elements of a conventional base station. Typically, a remote radio head comprises radio frequency equipment, analogue-to-digital/digital-to-analogue converters and up/down converters, for example. Rest of the base station functionality may be situated elsewhere.
A cloud based solution may help reduce the footprint of individual base stations. It would also contain the complexity of the RRH to an extent making it essentially a plug and play device that would be cheaper to buy and easier to install and maintain. The cloud itself by definition is scalable and elastic with the ability to add and remove nodes dynamically. The compute elements of a cloud based networks could therefore also be scaled up and down relatively easily. However, traditional clouds are designed to handle a large number of parallel processing tasks. MapReduce architecture is typically used to provide a capability to process large data sets with a distributed algorithm on a cluster of interconnected computing devices.
However, the requirements of a communication system are different and designing a cloud based communication system is not a trivial task.